Prequel: The Flood and the Origin of the 'Pagan' Gods

By Glyn Thomas and Gregory Thomas

Today we are experiencing global average sea levels rising by 3.4mm (0.13 inches) per annum - climate.nasa.gov. However, nearly 13,000 years ago an event occurred which caused sea levels to rise rapidly, maybe by 10m in a decade (1,000mm per annum), and certainly over a peri

• Language: English
• Publisher: Truth Publications
• Release date: Jun 1, 2020
• ISBN: 9789887448914

Glyn Thomas

Glyn was fascinated by ancient history from an early age - how civilization developed, how life on earth developed, how our planet was terraformed and how the universe evolved. During a career working mainly in senior financial roles for large multinationals, the combined impact of dealing with corporate correspondence and keeping abreast of professional material precluded any opportunity to read for pleasure. Upon retirement in 2013, Glyn was able to immerse himself in the disciplines that beckoned - astronomy, archaeology and ancient history. To his astonishment and delight, our knowledge of these subjects has been utterly transformed over the period of his working life. Glyn has an unusual outlook on life, from a childhood awareness of immortality his quest has been to understand. Brought up as a Christian, he found the biblical record challenging to believe. Glyn has frequent dialogue with many religious friends but none are able to provide credible explanations for his many questions. More fundamental Christians seem to view 'science' as an adversary, unaware that religion originated as science and politics - early priests were astronomers and civil servants. Protestants widely proclaim their belief in the bible as being God's Word without knowing or questioning why for most of the Christian era, the church prohibited laity from reading it. Study of the bible reveals numerous factual errors and inconsistencies. Surely, if one adopts the bible as the foundation of one's belief in eternity and personal salvation - it needs to be a lot more reliable. Furthermore, theologians and biblical academics are fully aware of many changes to the texts made to reinforce dubious aspects of dogma - yet no priest or pastor would ever share their knowledge with their congregation. So, Glyn set about finding the Truth, what was Jesus original teaching? Glyn found his journey of discovery incredibly uplifting. Reassuringly, despite the selective screening of books included in the New Testament and the extensive editing of those which were admitted - echos of the original truth may be found in many places. This quest led not only to the discovery of Jesus original teaching but the need for substantial revision to the conventional view of ancient history and our earliest civilizations. A hugely rewarding result that the author wishes to share with others - hence this series of little books. This the author was moved to write and share his findings. As was said "Seek and ye shall find."

Book preview

Series Introduction

– why these booklets were written

From quite an early age, I have been fascinated by cosmology, geology, history and politics. In ancient cultures, politics was inseparable from religion – political power flowed through religious structures. The pharaoh or emperor was the high priest, the priests themselves constituted the civil service, the priests were the government scribes.

During my working life, the pressure of work combined with a heavy load of obligatory professional reading to crowd out reading for personal interest. So, following retirement in 2013, I was delighted to be able to delve into specialist material on the topics above. What I found both astonished and disappointed me. I am astonished by the extent that our knowledge in most fields has been radically transformed. When I was a boy, cosmologists were unsure whether our universe was continuing to expand or beginning to contract; climatologists believed we were heading towards another ice age; and some believed our Sun might be unique in having orbiting planets – possibly, our solar system was a special exception created by a benevolent God. Now I learn that the Vatican has a committee tasked with determining procedures and exchanges following First Contact with any intelligent aliens. My disappointments stem from the stubborn resistance of many conventional historical beliefs to accept hard evidence from more recent discoveries and the low level of lateral thinking which seems to stem from academics closeting themselves in narrow chimneys of specialist knowledge.

This last observation is one major spur behind the decision to author this series. I genuinely feel that significant new learning may be found by joining up the deep knowledge to be found in various isolated chimneys. Certainly, there is much that I found both startling and persuasive – sufficiently so that it spurred me to want to share with you.

Some read the title of this series and feel a phrase they personally revere may have been hijacked. The phrase the Truth will set you free being attributed to Jesus according to the Gospel of John 8:32. Knowledge of the real truth is indeed liberating. Those who may react to my adoption of the phrase for this series may feel I am setting myself up as a rival purveyor of the truth – I can assure those having such thoughts that their concern is misplaced.

Many believe the real truth is what they find in the bible. The journey thought this series will present fairly solid evidence that Jesus rejected most major tenets of Jewish faith as recorded in the books of the Old Testament – and much evidence for this is in the bible itself! Not only that, but for most of the past 2,000 years, the official church played down the Old Testament as being unimportant. For most of the period that the Catholic Church reigned supreme, say AD325 to AD1500, very little attention was paid to the books of the Old Testament. This was partly due to a widespread hatred of the Jews and partly as many of the senior hierarchy (understanding Hebrew) knew that the Old Testament did not really support the idea that there was only one God. For this reason and the inconvenient fact that much Catholic dogma has no biblical foundation, Catholic adherents were prohibited from reading or owning a copy of any books of the bible. The penalty of breaching this ecclesiastic law was excommunication and commitment to everlasting hell. And when that was felt insufficient, the sentence would be imposed immediately by burning the individual at the stake. It is hard to believe, but Catholics were only permitted to read the bible by a papal edict issued in 1943.

It was access to the bible, and in the vernacular translated into many languages, that triggered the growth of Protestantism. Reading the bible revealed the untruths in Catholic dogma and ignited the religious enmity between the two camps. Given Christians had been banned from reading their most sacred book for over a millennium, its text was devoured with gusto. Sola Scriptura (Scripture alone) became a watch-word, devout Christians started towards believing the bible is the ‘Word of God’ and therefore its text is inerrant – everything it says is true. A moments thought, without even questioning anything stated in the bible, suggests this to be a naive reaction. Having been under the sole control of the church for over a millennium, the learned leadership of the church was fully aware of the contradictions between biblical texts and Catholic dogma. It is naive to assume no attempts were made to conform texts to dogma that had been evolved by the papacy. This series will identify plenty of evidence of this. One example we shall cover in detail is the invention of the Trinity – which despite its centrality to conventional Christian dogma is only mentioned twice in the bible – in Matthew 28:19 and 1John 5:7. The text of Matthew 28:19 was changed during the third century and was hotly debated at the Council of Nicaea in AD325. No copy of 1John 5 with the Trinitarian formula has been found dated earlier than AD 1215 – and there are thousands of extant copies of 1John dated prior to this showing the original pre-Trinitarian text.

As we shall discover, not only were elements of belief fabricated but some of Jesus teaching was distorted and twisted to support political objectives after the Roman Empire decided to stop fighting Christianity and to subvert it to achieve its political agenda. My conclusions in this series reveal what I have found may be the original teaching of Jesus – hence the use of the well-known title phrase.

Despite the paragraphs above, this Prequel to the series barely touches on conventional religion but does set the scene for the reader to re-characterise their understanding of what are conventionally labelled pagan gods. This booklet will give the reader real insights and the latest research findings to look anew at the conventional account of ancient history covering the period from 4000BC to the rise of the Roman Empire.

Some of my conclusions may appear radical, none are intended to offend. If you know of evidence that contradicts or supports any observation or conclusion I make, I would be delighted to hear from you – at [e-mail] .

1

How the conventional understanding of human history emerged

1.1 Conventional history for Western societies emerged out of the post Imperial Roman period of the Dark Ages (cAD500 to c1400) into a period of renewed learning and innovation – the Reformation, with its attendant focus on culture, the arts and education. Academics had knowledge of Latin and Greek but no understanding of the written records from any earlier civilization – whilst monuments, tablets and pottery were found displaying Egyptian hieroglyphs and Mesopotamian cuneiform – none could be translated. So, from the Reformation onwards through to the 19th Century, students saw the Bible as the only authoritative source of human history prior to Alexander the Great.

1.2 The first breakthrough came with Napoleon’s troops unearthing what became known as the Rosetta stone dating from 196BC (with a text written in three scripts – ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs, Demotic Egyptian dating from c650BC and ancient Greek) in 1799 – which opened the door to understanding all Egyptian texts that had hitherto been totally indecipherable.

1.3 However, cuneiform writing remained a mystery for another 60 years. The cuneiform writing system had been in use for more than three millennia, through several stages of development, with examples now dated from the 34th century BC down to the second century AD. The original Sumerian script was adapted for the writing of the Akkadian language (the lingua franca of the Middle East from c.2000BC until gradually replaced by Aramaic over the course of the first millennium BC) as well as Elamite, Hittite, Hurrian and Ugaritic (Canaanite) languages. Cuneiform writing was gradually replaced by the Phoenician alphabet during the Neo-Assyrian Empire (911-612BC). By the second century AD, the cuneiform script had become extinct, and all knowledge of how to read it was lost until it began to be deciphered in the 19th century.

1.4 In 1835 Henry Rawlinson, a British East India Company army officer, visited the Behistun Inscriptions in Persia. Carved in the reign of King Darius of Persia (522-486BC), they consisted of identical texts in the three official languages of the empire: Old Persian, Babylonian (Akkadian), and Elamite. The Behistun inscription was to the decipherment of cuneiform what the Rosetta Stone was to the decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphs. Rawlinson correctly deduced that the Old Persian was a phonetic script and he successfully deciphered it. In 1837 he finished his copy of the Behistun inscription, and sent a translation of its opening paragraphs to the Royal Asiatic Society. It took until 1847 to complete and publish the first part of the Rawlinson’s Memoir, followed by the second part in 1849.

1.5 After translating the Persian text, Rawlinson and, working independently of him, the Irish Assyriologist Edward Hincks, began to decipher the older Akkadian text. They were greatly helped by the excavations of the Frenchman Paul Émile Botta and the Englishman Austen Henry Layard of the city of Nineveh from 1842. Among the treasures uncovered by Layard and his successor Hormuzd Rassam were, in 1849 and 1851, the remains of two libraries, now mixed up, usually called the Library of Ashurbanipal, a royal archive containing tens of thousands of baked clay tablets covered with cuneiform inscriptions. The extensive libraries were impeccably organised with detailed catalogue tablets in each section – these have helped prioritise translations but also reveal that only a minority of the tablets were recovered from the ruins.

1.6 By 1851, Hincks and Rawlinson could read 200 Babylonian signs. They were soon joined by two other decipherers: young German-born scholar Julius Oppert, and versatile British Orientalist William Henry Fox Talbot. In 1857, the four men met in London and took part in a famous experiment to test the accuracy of their decipherments. Edwin Norris, the secretary of the Royal Asiatic Society, gave each of them a copy of a recently discovered inscription from the reign of the Assyrian emperor Tiglath-Pileser I. A jury of experts was empanelled to examine the resulting translations and assess their accuracy. In all essential points, the translations produced by the four scholars were found to be in close agreement with one another.

1.7 A vast treasure trove of up to two million cuneiform tablets are estimated to have been excavated in modern times, of which it is estimated that between 30,000 – 100,000 have been read or published. What we have learned from those tablets translated so far is truly astonishing – revealing a very high level of civilization dating back to the very earliest tablets translated. We have elaborate records of history, star maps, stellar observations, tables of star rising predictions, legal codes, commercial contracts, shipping manifests, medicine, crop cultivation, cooking recipes, school text books, school exam papers, children’s school reports, and many other topics. The British Museum holds the largest collection (c.130,000), followed by the Vorderasiatisches Museum Berlin, the Louvre, the Istanbul Archaeology Museums, the National Museum of Iraq, the Yale Babylonian Collection (c.40,000) and Penn Museum. Most of these have lain in these collections for a century without being translated, studied or published, as there are only a few hundred qualified cuneiformists in the world.

1.8 Therefore, over the past 200 years we have recovered much ancient knowledge, either from original texts or from ancient copies which duly acknowledge even older, then pre-existing versions, which texts state have been faithfully copied. The use of baked clay tablets to record the cuneiform texts has enabled these to endure for periods in excess of 5,000 years. Such tablets, excavated from all over the Fertile Crescent of Mesopotamia, have enabled us to achieve a reasonable understanding of the languages of most civilisations predating the Greek. In addition, scientific advances in geology, climatology and archaeology have revealed many intriguing details. The newer specialism of astro-archaeology has yielded dating techniques employed by ancient builders when dedicating temples and monuments. The most likely meaning of many intriguing statements in the Torah have been identified, shedding light and explanations on historical accuracy of some sections of the Old Testament whilst revealing other parts to be well intentioned priestly imagination or leaps of faith arising from a lack of understanding of why events occurred.

1.9 So, for the privileged few, such as the reader hereof, your accumulated knowledge of history and your interest to understand more is increasingly rewarded by the wealth of information readily available. However, the reality is that you are becoming an ever smaller minority. Educators used to regard history as an essential ingredient to develop a well-informed citizen. Sadly, many education departments have downgraded history as a school subject and some governments control the syllabus of the subject as a way to justify their undemocratic hegemony over their country.

1.10 The much greater tragedy is the woefully poor level of education available today to a large portion of humanity. An article in The Economist dated 16 November 2018 reported on uneven progress achieved for the UN’s Millennium Development Goal that by 2015 all the world’s children would complete primary school. On paper this has largely been achieved: nine out of ten children are now enrolled. Alas, the figure is not as impressive as it sounds. Even though most of the world’s children go to school, an awful lot of them learn pretty much nothing there. According to a recent World Bank study of seven sub-Saharan African countries, half of nine-year-olds cannot read a simple word and three-quarters cannot read a simple sentence. The reason is terrible teaching. The same study found that only 7% of teachers had the minimum knowledge needed to teach reading and writing effectively. When classrooms were inspected to see whether a teacher was present, half the time the answer was no.

1.11 The internet is magnifying accessible information but facts are being diluted and distorted. It used to be that news media viewed themselves as paragons of accurate and responsible reporting, editorial standards sought to ensure all reports were fact-checked and reliable. The rise of alternative media and resulting channel fragmentation has resulted in ‘speed to market’ (24 hour news channels) often downgrading factual accuracy, whilst competition has led to ‘free’ news relying solely on advertising revenue. The result has been to slash costs by cutting journalistic staffing and investigative reporting to focus on attention grabbing headlines sourced from anywhere and anybody. (Sadly, this paragraph was written pre-Trump – so the depressing trend described above has now greatly deteriorated.)

1.12 The dependability of time available from countless sources is something we now take for granted – but it is actually a quite recent innovation. When we check the time and date showing on our smartphone, we cannot imagine the precise time showing on our device is any different to that of others anywhere in our timezone – New York and Miami or Hong Kong and Beijing – but it wasn’t always so. Even 150 years ago, time was a local concept – only the spread of railways triggered and supported the synchronization of time across nations. Railways developed first in the UK and as they spread across the country it was important to operate to a timetable and that required time in each city to be exactly the same. Even this fairly obvious need was slow to be met. The Great Western Railway adopted a common system wide time in 1843 but it was not until 1883 that all UK railways adopted Greenwich Mean Time (GMT). Other countries followed, with occasional quirks – until 1911 the clocks on the exterior walls of all French railway stations showed standard Paris Mean Time (itself 9 minutes out of sync with GMT) but clocks inside stations and the trains ran five minutes later – to allow passengers more time to catch their trains! Until the new fangled railways forced standardisation, time was measured by each locality by measuring from the sunrise, usually at a solstice for which precise astronomical measurements were published. But